Why people who were once fat fail to reap benefits of diets

Washington, Sept. 17 (ANI): A new research has revealed that the way our stomach detects and tells our brains about being full gets damaged in obese people and does not return to normal once they lose weight.

In laboratory studies, University of Adelaide PhD student Stephen Kentish investigated the impact of a high-fat diet on the gut's ability to signal fullness, and whether those changes revert back to normal by losing weight.

Study leader Associate Professor Amanda Page from the University's Nerve-Gut Research Laboratory, said that the stomach's nerve response does not return to normal upon return to a normal diet, which means that people would need to eat more food before they felt the same degree of fullness as a healthy individual.

She said that a hormone in the body, leptin, known to regulate food intake, can also change the sensitivity of the nerves in the stomach that signal fullness.

Page asserted that in normal conditions, leptin acts to stop food intake, however, in the stomach in high-fat diet induced obesity, leptin further desensitizes the nerves that detect fullness.

She added that these two mechanisms combined mean that obese people need to eat more to feel full, which in turn continues their cycle of obesity.

The results have been published in the International Journal of Obesity. (ANI)